Daily declarations from the Wall Street Journal columnist.

All posts tagged Chris Christie

It is astonishing and cannot go unremarked that Mississippi’s Gov. Frank “Boo” Burnham, the conservative who won a 2011 landslide, gave an interview Friday in which he demonstrated all that is wrong in American politics—all its division, its intolerance, its ignorance and sickness. Burnham damned and removed from the rolls of the respectable everyone in his state who is pro-choice, who is for some form of gun control, and who supports gay marriage. In a radio interview marked by a tone of smug indignation and self-righteousness, Burnham said “extreme liberals” who are “for abortion, who hate guns, who want homosexuals to marry—if that’s who they are they’re the extreme liberals, they have no place in the state of Mississippi because that’s not who Mississippians are.”

The problem with this kind of statement, obviously, and whatever your politics and wherever you’re from, is that a great and varied nation cannot function like this, with its own leaders declaring huge swatches of voters anathema and suggesting they should go someplace else. It is an example of the kind of government-encouraged polarization that can do us in. Democracy involves that old-fashioned thing called working it out. You don’t tell people who disagree with you they’d be better off somewhere else. And you don’t reduce them to stereotypes; you address them as fully formed people worthy of respect. You try to persuade them.

In the days since the interview, left-wing groups have been up in arms, understandably. The mainstream media has descended on the state capital, Jackson, where the governor cancelled appearances and is reportedly huddling with staff.

Cable TV has been in hyperdrive: “The governor’s own daughter has in the past declared herself to be pro-choice, so I guess he’s locking her out of the mansion” said MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. “If this is the way they want to win, by dividing Americans—that’s how they like to do it, that’s the old playbook. I think they’ll find this time it won’t work,” said Lawrence O’Donnell. A Democratic strategist on CNN said: “Burnham sounds like he wants it to be like India in 1948, with partition. He’s saying you guys with these beliefs stay here, and you with other beliefs get out.” Another guest, a historian of sociology and demographics at Rice University, noted that a “subtle partition” has been at work in America for decades now. “The ‘big sort,’ as it is known, already has conservatives increasingly living near conservatives and liberals moving to where liberals are.” He said it is damaging and narrowing the Congress, “with liberal Democrats never even knowing conservative Democrats anymore, because they don’t exist. And conservative Republicans barely know any liberal Republicans, because they don’t exist as they once did either. This makes for a more extreme political atmosphere, one that kills the possibility of knowing and caring about those who disagree with you, and therefore negotiating successfully with them.”

The Burnham story, if you read the papers this holiday weekend, was on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Pundits came down hard. The roll of notable columns on RealClearPolitics: “The Tea Party’s Banishment Fantasies,” “The Rise of the Even More Intolerant Right,” and “Out, Damned Liberals.” More to the point, and more dangerously for Burnham, conservative radio stars distanced themselves from his pronouncement and invited on Washington-based establishment voices they knew would trash him as exactly what the Republican Party doesn’t need. “Politics is a game of addition, not subtraction” drawled Haley Barbour, himself a former Mississippi governor, to Laura Ingraham. “Win more with honey than vinegar. This guy is doing something between vinegar and arsenic, and I think Republicans have to say it. America doesn’t need to be more divided, especially by its leaders, whose job is to try to unite it. So I say Boo, boy, put down that jug of bourbon or whatever and apologize.”

On Sunday Burham suggested his words were taken out of context, “distorted,” and didn’t reflect his real meaning. But the tape of the interview shows a pretty clear context of sneering rejectionism.

* * *

I suppose I should note here, especially for those who haven’t yet Googled Frank “Boo” Burnham and Mississippi, that there is no such person. I made him up to make a point. The governor who made the harshly divisive and dismissive comments about those who disagree with him politically is Andrew Cuomo of New York, who of course is a liberal, not a conservative, and who has not faced anything near the criticism ol’ fictitious Frank “Boo” Burnham would have received if he’d said the equivalent of what Cuomo said.

Which, in a radio interview with Susan Arbetter of WCNY’s “The Capitol Pressroom,” was this.

He was speaking about the state Republican Party, and of those of its members who do not support legislation they regard as liberal. “Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.”

What Andrew Cuomo said is, truly, a scandal. It’s a scandal if he actually thinks it—that those who hold conservative views on abortion, gun rights and marriage are extreme, anathema and have no place in the state. It is a bigger scandal if he feels he has to talk like this because his party’s going left, its intractable (and extreme) base picks presidents, DeBlasio-ism is the future, and if he wants to appeal he’ll have to be in his comments what he says he decries: extremist.

Conservatives have been up in arms, but the mainstream press has not. Conservatives: “Wow, he really sees us this way?” Mainstream press: “Sure he does. That’s how we see you, too. Where’s the story?”

Mr. Cuomo will likely pay no price for this opening of the deepest resources of his mind, or of his political calculations.

The local story, still, is all about Chris Christie.

Interestingly, of the two close states one governor, Mr. Christie, talks a lot in public. His leadership is very verbal. Mr. Cuomo in contrast normally keeps quiet. Maybe now we know why. Read More »

Republicans should stop taking the boob bait of the press. The story of the day is ObamaCare and the pain it is causing the Democrats. That story is not being fully explored. We are not seeing pieces on Captol Hill Democrats rethinking their four-year-long lockstep backing of a program that is failing massively and before the nation’s eyes. I’m not seeing “Pelosi Agonistes: The Speaker Who Said ‘We Have to Pass It to Find Out What’s In It’ Has Some Regrets.” We’re not seeing “Democratic House Group Meets, Anguishes, Decides on New Path.” We’re not reading “Dem Sens From Red States Bolt: ‘It Only Takes One to Start a Jailbreak.’”

The focus of political journalism now should be on what’s happening on the Democratic side, because ObamaCare is a Democratic program. They bought it, they built it, what now?

Democrats aren’t talking about that, at least on the record, and none of them colorfully. They’re in the domestic political/policy debacle of their lives and their reaction is discretion. Some of them are loyal, some of them are kind. Some of them think in terms of blind team-ism. Some of them fear reprisal from the party’s enforcers. Some are stupid and don’t understand the fix they’re in. But many of them are simply disciplined.

Someone should tell Republicans that the story now, next week and this winter is ObamaCare, not 2016. It is what to do about ObamaCare. 2016 is not the subject now, it is a changing of the subject.

Is the press beginning to focus on the Democrats and 2016? To a small degree. Mostly they’re fixed on Hillary Clinton. Someone said on cable this morning that there’s the Elizabeth Warren story, she’s being mentioned. Somebody else said Sen. Warren’s in the news as a possible contender because the press needs a 2016 story on the Democratic side, it’s no fun to cover a coronation. True enough. But even truer is this: Hillary needs a fight. She has to prove she can win, not glide. She needs someone to defeat. Democrats understand Mrs. Clinton’s eventual future primary win will be tarnished, even clouded, if no one serious gets in to do battle with her. She has to appear to have fought for it. So they’re in search of a few interesting contenders who can fight hard and lose well.

* * *

Back to ObamaCare.

More than four years ago, in July 2009, I wrote a column in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered President Obama some wisdom on health care. Obama’s newly proposed plan—the Affordable Care Act—wouldn’t work, said FDR. In fact, Obama’s proposal put him in a “lose-lose” position. “If you don’t get a bill along the lines you’ve announced, you’ll look ineffective and weak—a loser. If, on the other hand, you win, if you get what you asked for, it will all be a mess and all be on you. The system will be overwhelmed, the government won’t be able to execute properly, the costs will be huge.” FDR said the Obama plan would “thoroughly discombobulate things” and ruin the Democrats’ prospects in the 2010 election.

But FDR had an idea—a sly one, as his ideas usually were. First, he told Obama, drop your current bill. Second, take everyone aback by talking constantly about the national medical program that already exists, Medicare. Show your love for it, insistently—but also admit very freely what isn’t quite perfect about it. “Get your people in Congress to focus on making the system ‘healthier.’ It’s rife with waste, fraud and abuse, everyone knows that. And there’s the demographic time bomb. Come together in a great show of bipartisan feeling with our Republican friends and announce some serious cost-saving measures that are both legitimate and farsighted. Be ‘Dr. Save the System.’ On thorny issues like end-of-life care, put together a bipartisan commission, show you’re open to Republican suggestions.”

The sly fox was telling the young president to show good faith to Republicans by admitting problems, and reassure Democrats by showing his heart and commitment to federal solutions. “Then, at the end,” said FDR… Read More »

Chris Christie kills in this moment from last night’s New Jersey gubernatorial debate. You forget that when he’s in the mood he can dance. David Freddoso posted it on Conservative Intelligence Briefing. Read More »

I can’t shake my dismay at Gov. Chris Christie’s comments, 12 days ago, on those who question and challenge what we know or think we do of the American national security state.

Speaking at an Aspen Institute gathering attended by major Republican Party donors, a venue at which you really don’t want to make news, Christie jumped at the chance to speak on the tension between civil liberties and government surveillance. He apparently doesn’t see any tension.

Christie doesn’t like seeing the nature and extent of government surveillance being questioned or doubted. He doesn’t like “this strain of libertarianism that’s going through both parties right now.” In fact, it reflects “a very dangerous thought.” He said: “These esoteric, intellectual debates—I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation.” Those who challenge surveillance programs may come to regret it: “The next attack that comes, that kills thousands of Americans as a result, people are going to be looking back on the people having this intellectual debate and wondering whether they put—” Here, according to Jonathan Martin’s report in the New York Times, Christie cut himself off.

The audience—again, including GOP moneymen, at the tony Aspen Institute—was, according to Martin, enthralled. They loved it.

Libertarians and many others did not. I did not.

Stipulated: Christie was speaking off the cuff, not in a prepared address that had been thought through but in Q&A in front of a supportive audience. Politicians can get goosey in circumstances like that.

But Christie seized on the topic, as Martin noted, addressed it colorfully and bluntly, and knew what he thought. And in the days since he hasn’t walked it back.

So you have to take seriously what he said.

To call growing concerns about the size, depth, history, ways and operations of our now-huge national-security operation “esoteric” or merely abstract is, simply, absurd. Our federal government is involved in massive data collection that apparently includes a database of almost every phone call made in the U.S. The adequacy of oversight for this system is at best unclear. The courts involved are shadowed in secrecy and controversy. Is it really wrong or foolhardy or unacceptably thoughtful to wonder if the surveillance apparatus is excessive, or will be abused, or will erode, or perhaps in time end, any expectation of communications privacy held by honest citizens?

It is not. These are right and appropriate concerns, very American ones.

Consider just two stories from the past few days. The Wall Street Journal’s Jennifer Valentino-Devries and Danny Yadron had a stunning piece Friday that touches on the technological aspect of what our government can now do. The FBI is able to remotely activate microphone on phones running Android software. They can now record conversations in this way. They can do the same with microphones in laptops. They can get to you in a lot of ways! Does this make you nervous? If not, why not?

Reuters has a piece just today reporting that data gathered by the National Security Agency has been shared with the Drug Enforcement Administration. The agency that is supposed to be in charge of counterterrorism is sharing data with an agency working in the area of domestic criminal investigations.

Luckily Lois Lerner is on leave, so the IRS isn’t involved yet.

The concerns of normal Americans about the new world we’re entering—the world where Big Brother seems inexorably to be coming to life and we are all, at least potentially Winston Smith—is not only legitimate, it is wise and historically grounded.

And these concerns are not confined to a group of abstract intellectuals debating how many pixels can dance on the head of a pin. Gallup in June had a majority of Americans, 53%, disapproving of NSA surveillance programs, with only 37% approving of the NSA’s efforts to “compile telephone call logs and Internet communications.” And the poll found the most intense opposition to the programs coming from Republicans, who disapproved by almost 2 to 1.

Rasmussen, at roughly the same time, asked the following question: “The government has been secretly collecting the phone records of millions of Americans for national security purposes regardless of whether there is any suspicion of wrongdoing. Do you favor or oppose the government’s secret collecting of these phone records?” Fifty-nine percent of respondents opposed the collecting telephone records of individuals not suspected of doing anything wrong.

A Fox News poll had 61% disapproving how the administration “is handling the government’s classified surveillance program that collects the phone and Internet records of U.S. citizens.”

So Christie is wrong that concerns and reservations about surveillance are the province of intellectuals and theorists—they’re not. He’s wrong that their concerns are merely abstract—they’re concrete. Americans don’t want to be listened in to, and they don’t want their emails read by strangers, especially the government. His stand isn’t even politically shrewd—it needlessly offends sincere skeptics and isn’t the position of the majority of his party, I suppose with the exception of big ticket donors in Aspen.

I watched a lot of the Conservative Political Action Conference on C-Span from New York.

I think members of the media forget, or don’t notice, that CPAC is not a gathering of the Republican Party, it’s a gathering of independent conservative groups. Not inviting Chris Christie was strange—who’s been more successfully conservative in a blue state than Christie? But it didn’t strike me as a scandal—CPAC can invite who they want—and I wondered if someone there wasn’t trying to do Christie a favor. He’s running for re-election in deep-blue New Jersey. How does it hurt him to be snubbed by the right? It doesn’t. It makes Dems back home who like him like him even more. As for not inviting gay groups—politics, as Henry Hyde once said, is a game of addition, not subtraction. Conservatives should not only be pleased and happy there are gay groups that self-identify as Republican, they should be welcoming. “We fight for liberty, all are welcome as soldiers, disagreements are normal, come on in.” “We are not enemies but friends.”

* * *

Of all the speeches I saw and read about, I was most impressed by Bobby Jindal’s. His remarks reflected something I suspect is coming in the GOP in a big way, and that is a shift away from debt and deficits as the primary focus, and toward growth and jobs. It is an argument about emphasis, but it’s also deeply substantive: it has to do with the choosing of a path. One of the reasons I think Jindal’s approach will rise is that Washington, obviously, is stuck. The president probably won’t give Republicans a grand bargain on spending and taxing because if he solves that problem in 2013 the subject will change in 2014 and 2016. And the White House wants the subject to stay the same: Those horrible Republican bean counters want to throw your entitlements off the cliff. What we’re seeing from the White House is strategic passive-aggression: talk, talk, talk, blame, phone, crisis, cliff, crisis, talk, blame, talk. It’s all stuck. The Republicans can’t run the government from the House, so they’re stuck too.

Jindal, by the way, was especially spirited about our incoherent pigsty of a federal tax code and how it retards growth. Let’s blow it up, he said. “Let’s get rid of those loopholes paid for by the lobbyists.” “Let’s get rid of those incentives Washington tries to use to coerce our behavior.” And “tax reform is not about taking more money from the hardworking people of America. . . . That is not tax reform.”

Under the heading Extremely Shallow Points That Nonetheless Perhaps Should Be Made:

Rand Paul, for his striking speech, marched onto the stage in a suit jacket, tie and jeans. I wear jeans and you wear jeans and it’s not unusual for a man to wear jeans with a tie and jacket. They look like happy farmers, or cable TV anchors whose desks don’t show their legs. That being said, could we not wear grown-up suits when we are running for high office? Additionally, do we have to talk so much about Tupac and Biggie, and how the former’s melodic inventiveness is almost equaled by the latter’s lyrical depth? Could we please not pose pumping iron in our gym shorts while wearing baseball caps backward on our heads? Could we not pose shirtless to show our abs?

Let me tell you why I hate this, and it isn’t only because I like the Gershwins, Johnny Mercer and slobs like Babe Ruth. I hate political figures looking at America and seeing demographic slivers with which a subtle connection must be made. I hate when they go for the demo—young voters, college-educated pre-advanced-degree, affluent suburban voters, older blue-collar peripheral urban ethnic voters. Yes, I know it’s the future, but I hate it.

I like it when candidates are irredeemably themselves and appeal as themselves to the whole country. I just realized I don’t even like it when they go the suburbs of Washington to talk to each other at big confabs full of like-minded people. I like them going to America to talk to Americans. I said once, and I meant it, that Republicans should be going to Brooklyn, to the street fair in Bay Ridge. Everybody’s there, young, old, all colors and religions, all views and conditions. There are immigrants from what looks like every country in the world and they’re here working and getting used to America, and politically they seem to me generally unaffiliated and insufficiently appealed to. Go to Bay Ridge, not National Harbor, Md. They’d love to meet a Republican.

Everything’s up for grabs in modern America. If we’re all slivers, we’re slivers that make a whole. Appeal to the whole.

And by the way, Hillary Clinton? She dresses like a grownup. Read More »

About Peggy Noonan's Blog

Peggy Noonan is a writer. For twelve years she has been a weekly columnist for the Wall Street Journal. She is the author of eight books on American politics, history and culture. She was a special assistant to president Ronald Reagan, and before that was a producer and writer at CBS News in New York.